Coupons and Product Discounts

Overview

This article explains how to provide customers with discounts off your products' regular prices.

From time to time, you may want to offer promotional discounts on your products—like having special sale prices for a seasonal or themed promotional event. FastSpring offers two great ways to accomplish this: using built-in product discounts or using coupon codes.

Which method of creating promotional discounts is right for you? Here is a comparison of the fundamental features of the two types of promotional discounts:

Product Discounts

Coupons

Reduce the price of one or more products

Allow you to schedule automatic beginning and ending/expiry dates

Include an optional, customer-facing discount reason/explanation

Can be applied to one or more recurring charges in a subscription

Require the customer to enter a special discount code

Allow tracking the effectiveness of marketing campaigns via reporting

Are available only to specific customers (i.e., those who know the coupon codes)

Are available to ALL customers

Can be limited to a certain number of total uses (e.g., to the first 100 customers)

Can provide varying discounts based on the quantity purchased by the customer (i.e., volume discounts)

Product Discount Example

Coupon Example

Tip

You are not required to choose between using coupons and using built-in product discounts. You can use both methods. In fact, if you select the Combine Discounts checkbox when editing a coupon, you can even apply both discounts to the same product.

Tip

When you use either discount method, detailed information about the applied discount is available in certain optional webhook events such as order.completed. You can also obtain the discount details in response to calls to certain FastSpring API endpoints, such as /orders.

Using Built-In Product Discounts

Product discounts are separate from the standard product pricing. However, you can configure them via the Pricing field of each product, bundle, or subscription. With product discounts, any customer who buys the product gets a discount. Customers do not have to enter a coupon code, which may improve your conversion rate compared to a coupon-based promotional campaign. As with coupons, you can specify a begin date and an end date for product discounts. And, as with coupons, product discounts can be applied to a specific number of future subscription charges automatically. Unlike coupons, product discounts can optionally be triggered—and the amount or percentage of the discount can even change—based on the quantity of the product in the customer's cart.

To Set Up a Product Discount

Step 1. Access the product's Pricing dialog.

From the FastSpring App, select the Products menu.

Select the Products, Bundles, or Subscriptions tab, according to the type of product for which you want to set up discounts.

Click the tile of the product, bundle, or subscription for which you want to set up discounts. The detail page opens for the selected item.

Click anywhere in the item's Pricing field. The Pricing dialog opens.

Step 2. Select the discount type and enter the discount amount or percentage.

Scroll down (if necessary) to the Discounted Price section. If you want to enter discount amounts (or percentages) based on the quantity purchased by the customer, select the Use Volume Discount checkbox. The field configuration automatically changes to allow you to configure the quantities that must be purchased in a single order to receive the discount. If you want to enter a discount amount or percentage that applies regardless of the quantity in the order, do not select this checkbox.

The Percent Off drop-down selector lets you specify whether the discounts are percent-based or are specific amounts. With Percent Off selected, you can enter a discount percentage of up to 100% (if you enter more than 100%, it is automatically reduced to 100% upon saving your changes). If you want to provide specific discount amounts, click the drop-down selector and choose Amount Off. The field configuration changes again, to allow you to enter the discount amount in each currency supported by your Store.

If you selected Use Volume Discounts:

In the quantity field beneath the Percent Off/Amount Off selector, enter the minimum quantity that the customer must purchase to receive the discount. Orders with a lower quantity for this product will not receive the discount.

Optionally, click + Add Quantity to specify one or more additional quantity thresholds at which the discount per quantity increases. For example, you might offer a discount of $5.00 off each quantity for customers who purchase 2 or more, and a discount of $7.50 off each when customers buy 5 or more.

Step 3. Optionally, enter a date range for the discount and a discount reason for your customers to see. Be sure to click Save to save your changes.

If you want to specify a limited date range for a temporary discount, select the checkbox labeled Limit Discount Availability Dates. The field configuration changes to allow you to specify the beginning and end dates.

Optionally click the Start Date, Start Time, End Date, or End Time fields and specify dates and times from the built-in date and time selectors. You are not required to specify all four values. The discount percentage or amount entered above will not be available before the Start Time on the Start Date, nor after the End Time on the End Date. Outside of the specified date range, the discount will be ignored, and the standard pricing for the product or bundle will apply.

Tip

Enter dates and times in UTC. For example, if you are in the U.S. Pacific time zone, UTC is seven hours ahead of you. Therefore, if you want the discount to begin at midnight Pacific time, enter 17:00 (i.e., 5:00 pm) with a Start Date of the previous day.

In the Reason field, you can optionally enter a customer-facing explanation for the discount. For example, if you are configuring a temporary discount for a holiday promotion, you might enter something like Halloween Special! in this field. You can optionally click the language drop-down and enter the explanation in each supported language.

When you have finished with all fields in the Pricing popup window, click Save at the bottom right-hand corner to save your changes.

Using Coupons

By creating a coupon, you can set up a discount that can be limited to only customers who have the correct coupon codes. The codes themselves can be good for a limited number of uses each (e.g., 1 use per code). Or, you can create a code that you can advertise, which anyone can use. With a single code, you can allow unlimited uses, or the coupon can be valid for the first X customers to enter the code.

Coupons can also be used to help track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by running sales reports and selecting to break down the results by coupon, or using data exports, webhooks, or the FastSpring API. Unlike with built-in product discounts, a single coupon can be applied to multiple items in an order. By contrast, built-in product discounts must be configured separately for each product.

Other Methods of Implementing Discounts

In addition to using built-in product discounts or coupons, advanced users can also implement discounts by overriding a product's default pricing using a secure payload with the Store Builder Library. Another approach is to override the pricing using a pre-generated session via the /sessions endpoint of the FastSpring API. You can also configure built-in product discounts when creating or updating a product via the /products endpoint.

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